Young Adults Roosting In The Nest

It’s a common cliche of dating - your place or mine? - but it can be a source of embarrassment for the many singles today for whom the answer is, “Well, uh, I live with my parents.”

For several decades now, more young adults have been taking more time to get out on their own.

In fact, more than 5 million young adults ages 25 to 34 are living with one or both parents, according to the latest U.S. Census figures. That’s up from 3 million in 1980 and more than double the number in 1970. And more than 60 percent of the current crop are young men.

What’s going on? Cynics may say that the TLC young men can’t get from career-driven young women these days, they are seeking from doting mothers. But while some young men will acknowledge the comforts of home are compelling, most say their circumstances are forced by finances.

“I wanted to go to graduate school and figured as far as financially, it was easier if I went back home,” says Frank Holmes, who at 28 only recently moved out of his parent’s house in Smithtown, N.Y., to seek employment in the Washington, D.C., area.

“If I move out, there are only two choices: a rat-infested hovel or $1,000-a-month penthouse,” says David Kaplan, a 25-year-old freelance writer who lives with his parents and younger sister in New York City. “There’s not much in between. That’s really the problem.”

But if staying home means saving money, socially there may be a high price to pay. Young men are usually held to stricter account by their peers, especially by women who live on their own themselves.

“I think it would have a negative connotation unless there were a real good reason,” says Leila Meresman, 34. She lived with a roommate after college but has lived alone since she was 26.

“I think I would be concerned that this person hadn’t established himself yet … (Not) managing independent living on their own, taking care of themselves.”

Meresman, director of public relations for Lancome cosmetics, has been seeing someone for five months - he’s 35 and has his own apartment. She recalls that in her 20s she and her girlfriends would talk about how they weren’t even sure they would go out with men who had roommates.

Such attitudes aren’t lost on Kaplan. “It gets a little embarrassing,” he says. “(Women) feel I should be on my own, especially when they live on their own. … I just generally try to gloss over that or something. Try to change the topic. … It has been a problem for me wanting to pursue a more serious relationship. I feel I’d rather wait until I have my own place.”

Certainly when it comes to having a love life, the logistics of living at home aren’t easy. “You could just tell there was a certain tension,” he says, explaining that a few times he had a girlfriend stay overnight and his mother expressed dismay that he hadn’t consulted her about it. He felt he shouldn’t have to ask.

“It was definitely evident there was a problem,” Kaplan said.

Similarly, Holmes says the idea of spending the night together was out of the question when he was seeing a former girlfriend who for a time also lived at home. “I knew my parents would never go for that,” he says. “And her parents were fairly conservative.”

And while a solution might be seeing a woman who has her own place, there is still a sense in which it is the men who are expected to make the first move toward freedom.

“We do see men as being more aggressive, as the ones first to leave the hearth and go out and hunt,” says Phyllis Lieber of Kings Point, N.Y., a former family counselor who, with Gloria S. Murphy and Annette Merkur Schwartz, is a coauthor of “Grown-Up Children, Grown-up Parents: Opening the Door to Healthy Relationships Between Parents and Adult Children” (Birch Lane Press, $18.95). “And no matter how we perceive each other as equal, there are differences between men and women.”

“It’s very unfair to men,” says Denise Winston, a professional matchmaker and “love coach” whose display ad can be found in the back pages of New York magazine. “If they’re still at home, what kind of bacon can they bring home? … It’s about time we stopped this double standard and gave men more of a break and start seeing them as human beings.”

Still, Winston says her clients would raise questions about a prospective date, male or female, who was living at home beyond a certain point, certainly by age 30, maybe even a little younger.